Page Text: Posted by b at 14:39 UTC | Comments (312)
Open Thread 2022-45 (Not Ukraine)
News and views NOT related to Ukraine ...
Posted by b at 14:39 UTC | Comments (132)
April 13, 2022
U.S. Military Intelligence Official Refutes 'Russian Atrocities' Claims
Russian soldiers left the town Bucha in Ukraine on March 30. Two days later the Ukrainian Gestapo like SBU and men of the fascist Azov battalion moved in to find and remove 'traitors' . On April 2/3 video was published that showed freshly killed men laying on the streets of Bucha. Several of them had white arm bands signaling to Russian forces to see them as friendlies.
The 'west' and Ukrainian officials immediately called those dead the result of 'Russian atrocities'.
The Bucha 'Russian' atrocities propaganda onslaught may have worked well in the 'west' but it lacks evidence that Russia had anything to do with it.
The former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar calls it an outright fake : ...
And a fake it was.
Thankfully there are still some sane U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officials and William Arkin is talking with them :
Last Wednesday, Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk said that 320 people had been killed in the town of 37,000.
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"It is ugly," a senior official with the Defense Intelligence Agency tells Newsweek. "But we forget that two peer competitors fought over Bucha for 36 days, and that the town was occupied, that Russian convoys and positions inside the town were attacked by the Ukrainians and vice versa, that ground combat was intense, that the town itself was literally fought over."
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"I am not for a second excusing Russia's war crimes, nor forgetting that Russia invaded the country," says the DIA official. "But the number of actual deaths is hardly genocide. If Russia had that objective or was intentionally killing civilians, we'd see a lot more than less than .01 percent in places like Bucha."
320 of 37,000 is not .01 percent. But we do not know how many of those dead were Russian or Ukrainian soldiers. Some of the dead were so called 'civilian defenders' which were supposedly local civilians to whom the government had handed guns to 'fight the Russians'. During a war a 'civilian' with a government issued gun shooting at enemy soldiers is a combatant, not a civilian.
Posted by b at 14:55 UTC | Comments (418)
April 12, 2022
How The U.S. Does 'Diplomacy'
The U.S. doesn't do diplomacy. Every country has its own interests. But the U.S. and its pricks in the State Department insist that its interests must have priority over all others. Any country that disagrees with that will be called out on this or that issue or will even get sanctioned.
March 19 2022: President Xi Jinping Has a Video Call with US President Joe Biden
The two sides exchanged views on the situation in Ukraine.
President Biden expounded on the US position, and expressed readiness for communication with China to prevent the situation from exacerbating.
President Xi pointed out that China does not want to see the situation in Ukraine to come to this. China stands for peace and opposes war. This is embedded in China’s history and culture. China makes a conclusion independently based on the merits of each matter. China advocates upholding international law and universally recognized norms governing international relations. China adheres to the UN Charter and promotes the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security. These are the major principles that underpin China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis.
March 21 2022: US announces new sanctions on Chinese officials over ‘repressive acts’
The State Department said it would impose visa restrictions on Chinese officials it said are believed to be responsible for “policies or actions aimed at repressing religious and spiritual practitioners, members of ethnic minority groups, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, labor organizers, civil society organizers, and peaceful protestors in China and beyond.”
April 11 2022: Ukraine dominates Modi-Biden talks
Mr. Modi, who spoke via videolink to Mr Biden, described the situation in Ukraine as “very worrying” and said he had spoken, several times, with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin and had not just urged peace, but also direct talks between them. India’s unwillingness to call out Russia by name for its attack on Ukraine has not gone down well in Washington, but U.S. officials have also said that they hoped countries that have relationships with Moscow might leverage them to bring about a resolution to the situation.
April 12 2022: US Monitoring "Rise In Human Rights Abuses" In India: Antony Blinken
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was monitoring what he described as a rise in "human rights abuses" in India by some officials, in a rare direct rebuke by Washington of New Delhi.
"We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values (of human rights) and to that end, we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials," Mr Blinken said on Monday in a joint press briefing with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.
January 10 2022: Chas Freeman - Diplomacy as an Instrument of Statecraft: A Practicum
What distinguishes diplomats from courtiers, securocrats, and other bureaucrats in a national capital is a reliance on empathy: the ability to see the world through other eyes and to use this insight to induce others to see their interests the way the diplomat wants them to see them. It takes more than a diplomatic passport, position, or title to make someone a “diplomat.” Diplomacy, like other skilled work, requires knowhow gained through training, mentoring, on-the-job experience, and awareness of historical precedents. It is a calling and a role, not a job title.
Yet diplomacy remains at best a proto-profession in the United States, thanks to the uniquely American reliance on the political spoils system to staff even key national security functions. This makes diplomatic appointments to benefit appointees and their political parties rather than the country. It thereby enshrines amateurism and incompetence. As the New York Herald-Tribune put it in 1857, in the United States “diplomacy is the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle. A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.” Only one thing has changed about this in the last 165 years. Female campaign donors and celebrities now compete with men for appointments to what they imagine are ambassadorial sinecures in plummy places abroad, leaving seedy and dangerous places to lifers.
Posted by b at 10:42 UTC | Comments (407)
April 11, 2022
The Reasons For And Dangers Behind The War In Ukraine
The war in the Ukraine continues but the propaganda hysteria around it seems to have calmed down a bit as reality is setting in.
This gives room from more sane voices to be heard by the public. I will start with the Russian ones.
The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was interviewed by Newsweek. He explained Russia's political and judicial reasoning behind the war:
"The special operation in Ukraine is the result of the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to stop the genocide of Russians by fulfilling its obligations under the international commitments," Antonov told Newsweek. "The desire of the NATO member states to use the territory of a neighboring state to establish a foothold in the struggle against Russia is also obvious."
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To Russia, Antonov said that the [Maidan] revolution was a "bloody coup d'état instigated by the West" in which "ultranationalist ideas came to power in Kiev." He said that policies viewed by Moscow as hostile such as the removal of Russian as a national language and the rehabilitation of nationalist Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, had "taken root in Ukraine under external administration."
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Antonov argued that it was the "nationalist frenzy and revanchist sentiments of the Kiev regime" that resulted in the effective death of the Minsk deals as Ukraine chose "the path of rapid militarization" with help from abroad.
"The NATO member countries have commenced a military exploration of Ukraine," Antonov said. "It was flooded with Western weaponry while President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev's plans to acquire nuclear weapons which would threaten not only neighboring countries, but also the entire world."
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"In this context, Russia had no other choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics," Antonov said. "Then, in accordance with Chapter VII, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with the authorization of the Federation Council of Russia and in execution of the Treaties of Friendship and Mutual Assistance with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin made a decision to begin a special military operation."
"Its aim is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine in order to reduce military threats posed by the Western states that are trying to use the fraternal Ukrainian people in the struggle against the Russians," he added.
Sergey Karaganov is a high level Russian political scientist and commentator who is also a presidential advisor in Moscow. He was interviewed (in English) by the Italian Corriere Della Sera